![]() ![]() At Amberhurst, he thinks his place is in the kitchen, with Nat and Peters. "All those empty rooms! No, thank you," he had said, used to the comforting huddled warmth of the family farm. But she is a Lovell too, half-Romany, half-Irish, and the lanes call her name.Īmberhurst House had seemed huge and empty to Clem when he'd first visited. Hers is the last Cunningham Twiss name inscribed in the Admiral's family bible, the heir to Amberhurst House, and like her eighteenth century namesake Kezia Kizzy is a horsewoman born and trained with a keen eye and gentle hands for the Admiral's thoroughbred foals. ![]() Kizzy's adoption papers are as legal as Olivia can make them, but - she's only interested if it has four legs and eats oats, the village mutters. "You want Clem to take on the estate?" And Kizzy, she thinks, but does not say. ![]() Last summer, he and Nat had laid down hard standing against the damp and brought in stone for the fire pit, relaid the orchard fence and widened the stream. ![]() "I'll always come back, Kiz."Ĭlem's roots run deep, deeper than he knows, across the Downs, over the fields, under the foundations of the house and out to the orchard where Kizzy's wagon is drawn up. "I thought you'd be here forever." Kizzy throttles tragedy, buries it under silence and uncompromising pride, but her dark eyes are wide and wounded. She does not offer tea, nor her own gingerbread. Mrs Cuthbert makes Prue brush her hair and put on her best blouse, and takes scones to the Home Farm in a tin from Marks and Spencer. No village child had gone on to university, before Clem Oliver. ![]()
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